


going west

by owenmeany



Category: True History of the Kelly Gang (2019)
Genre: Implied/Referenced Character Death, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, be gay do crime evict the rich, it's a race between me and justin kurzel to see who can make ned more gay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-23
Updated: 2020-04-23
Packaged: 2021-02-23 00:49:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23803135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owenmeany/pseuds/owenmeany
Summary: "In the fire he saw himself and he was no longer Ned Kelly; the name had been burned off of him, like dirt from skin."Ned and Joe, from beginning to end.
Relationships: Joe Byrne/Ned Kelly, Steve Hart/Dan Kelly
Comments: 9
Kudos: 21





	going west

(I)

Joe was just out of prison when he first met him. Six months for livestock theft but one bull and even then from another dirt poor man who had as little to lose as Joe himself, as Jim told it; Joe didn’t look like the sort of man who’d been in prison. No one deserved to go, not out here, not really - his own father and himself as a child and many other men who had passed through his mother’s farm had been in a cell before, and there was rarely a thing in common between them but the same harrowed look in the their eyes. It was a hunger that was not satiated by food. Instead it seemed to himself and his mother a permanent damage, some kind of scar tissue on the soul. In shopfront windows in neighbouring towns Ned himself would hover and seem to be admiring the men’s suits and women’s jewellery - but in the glass he would examine his own face in a way that moving water, however clear, has never been able to provide. He had that same look, and it was the same as his father’s - dark, ravenous and expanding. Yet Joe Byrne from across the room being led by his friend did not have this same look. His face seemed soft and his hair long, his glance unassuming, gently inquisitive, like an animal guided by reins. 

He had high cheekbones and a slight smile. When he spoke it was low and measured and made his mouth twist. “You’re Jim’s brother?” 

He had nodded. 

“Joe Byrne.” He took Ned’s hand and held it very gently. When he let go Ned resented the warmth. At his side he curled his fingers into the tough edge of his jacket. “Are you a good man?” Joe’s voice was soft as he stood by Ned’s side and watched the other men at the bar. “You fight well?”

Ned shrugged. In truth he had tried not to steal or hurt a man since Harry made him put a bullet in Sergeant O’Neill and then Sergeant O’Neill returned the kindness by cutting off two of his toes. “Why? What is it to you?”

Joe lit his pipe. He closed his eyes. His eyelashes were long, soft against his face. He opened his mouth and from it like the mouth of a cave from which all kinds of devils escaped came smoke, sweet-smelling and discoloured. 

“You look dangerous.” He turned and offered his pipe to Ned, who took it from him clumsily, misjudging the weight and shape of it, the brush of Joe’s fingers against his. “You walk like an angry man.”

He nodded. Something turned over in his stomach. For years he had been trying to temper the concealed spite and rage that simmered in his belly. It had got his father and Harry Power killed, it might as well have rotted off the toes that O’Neill took from him, it alienated all his mother’s allies and it forced him far away from home. It had been growing inside him, unacknowledged, resented, and he was afraid of it, and afraid of himself. And now at last it seemed all that time it was barely hidden at all. Perhaps not everyone could see it; but men like Joe Byrne could.

He turned away, copying what he could remember of Joe’s movements, for he had never used a pipe before, and held it in his hands like a bird with broken parts. He inhaled deeply, felt the smoke burn in his throat and gullet, felt the inside of his head contract and brush up against the sides of his skull. When he opened his eyes Joe was watching him and didn’t look away. His face was covered by the long shadows in the bar; it made the edges of his eyes and mouth shimmer, undefined. That was the most startling thing; anybody else, particularly the men that he caught looking in the street or on the plains, looked away, scared by what they saw or to be found looking. Joe only laughed, quietly, and took the pipe from his hands. 

“I’m not angry.” He kept his voice even. Across the bar a woman sat on a man’s lap and cradled his chin, ran her thumbs over his cheeks. The man looked at her with an adoration that Ned himself had never felt; whilst the woman, in her performance and great talent, seemed genuine until the set of her jaw, which betrayed a flat frustration. At the far end of the bar some jostling had become rough, as one man threw another over the bar and shoved him to the ground. Keenly Ned felt the tremor in his shoulders return.

Joe looked down at his feet and nodded, pressing his lips together. “Don’t hurt me, Ned Kelly. I was only saying what I saw.”

Ned turned and put a hand to Joe’s arm. “I wouldn’t.” He felt sheepish under Joe’s gaze, for the way he had moved quickly and the shy way he spoke. 

“But you will.” Joe put his hand over Ned’s and kept it there. The fight drew in all the men around it and from the shallow edges of Ned’s vision they seemed to move as one sprawl, an ancient creature that moved about the room. No one had seen but still Joe’s fingers seemed to burn through the fabric of his jacket. He was looking at Ned with a low, kind gaze. “You will.”

(II) 

The real raw joy that came from sporadic work - the only joy, really - was the lack of supervision. He had worked in towns and in factories and all of it made him queasy, as he was monitored constantly. He wasn’t bad with established work. Some places, like the hotel the town over, where some barristers had once passed through for a high profile trial, or the tailors for those who had money to spend, or the bar beneath the shopfront where he had first met Joe, would hire him as an additional hand for a stretch. For weeks and months at a time, passing around the back of places to load and unload goods, and sometimes - if he was lucky - drive them in a cart across town. Eventually the money would always dry up and they would dismiss him without notice; it was easy, because he was poor, and the mark of this congealed on his skin like dirt or disease, which made him disposable. Other times he would be lucky and someone desperate or ignorant might hire him out of county to break in horses or handle livestock in a different part of the country. No one hired him locally because he was a Kelly, and that like poverty was a disease that spread fear. He almost appreciated that, though, for it gave him reason to avoid returning home.

If he was lucky and scored a job of the second kind, he found his time quite often free, and could enjoy himself in the empty wild, for it reminded him of playing out the back of his house as a child, with no one but the winds and the damaged trees watching. It was best to get a cattle job, moving livestock from one end of Van Demons Land to another. It struck him that he was playing fate by filling the role of the men that had crossed his and Harry Power’s path. But he had more faith himself now he was grown, and though he did not like to satisfy the violence unless it was managed in a ring and paid for, he knew that he would be the more threatening party. This gave him a measure of power and freedom, which he used, in his fairly obvious way, to invite Joe along, and often without his employers knowledge. Joe never asked for money but Ned would split his wage every time nonetheless. Joe was stronger, he reasoned, lent a good hand with the work and besides gave his company freely. One job - almost a season long, through the coldest months - was spent moving and tending to a small heard over the Oxley Plains and then up by the Murray River past Adelaide to a farm recently set up by a wealthy Scotsman. 

He and Joe were friendly enough and spent a great deal of time drinking and talking and making camp together. He had even met Joe’s mother, once, when they travelled to his home during a particularly bad sickness. Neither Joe nor his mother pretended to understand Ned’s great concern, but he had seen two of the babies his mother had borne in that tiny hut taken by illness and fever. The friendship was not yet two years old and somehow, whilst he watched Joe’s unruly hair grow down past his chin and over his shoulders, whilst he watched Joe’s face lit by the glow of the fire whilst he made Ned laugh and told him stories of his family and his poor driven mother, whilst he watched Joe handle the animals with the gentle assurance an experienced parent might have for a child, hands over their heads, crooning softly in their ears to calm them, he knew that he had known Joe all his life, by what it lacked, and what he wanted. Joe still had a habit of making him feel unexpectedly seen. Often he would be caught in these moments looking at Joe with that warmth in his belly replacing the anger, and then feel shame. But also joy, always joy; for Joe never seemed to look away either.

After the job was done and they had begun the return to the heart of New South Wales - though Ned had felt compelled to change their route, taking them off-course to Melbourne so Joe could see his cousins - Joe was rendered quiet. Quieter than usual; not a slow and playful observance but something sullen and heavy he carried with him. Ned supposed it was the ignorance of the Scotsman, who seemed to be in the business of owning land and not livestock, and not caring about much in-between.

“He’ll kill them all,” said Joe, as they paused to water the horses. “He’ll starve them. I wouldn’t even say deliberately. The man had half a brain.”

Ned nodded. Joe’s solemn moods, though unexpected, were often justified. They tended to be accurate: there was little to be said, for Joe had spoken truthfully.

“Most likely.” He parsed his fingers through the animal’s mane. “He doesn’t deserve them.”

Joe shrugged and mounted his horse. “Neither do we.”

Ned looked down the path. Through the wood was clear and silent. Often the land they inhabited on these journeys was so dead he thought perhaps it put them into a similar state. At night he imagined his ghostly father in his red dress from the cairn stalking the plains around the house he grew up in, remembered the dead trees that stood like watchful soldiers around the hut, though they never moved to save a soul inside its four walls. Ultimately, if it meant O’Neill couldn’t touch him, Ned imagined that Red Kelly would walk the earth again, even with his dead skin and bulging eyes, for there was no feeling that ran through any Kelly’s blood stronger than anger.

“Come off the road, Joe.” Joe turned to look at him, twitching in the saddle. 

“It’ll be dark soon.”

“Exactly. Time enough to rest.”

“Won’t you want to get back to town?” Joe, in an unfamiliar display of nerves, tucked his hair behind his ears. 

“Not yet.” Not for many weeks yet. He hadn’t seen his family since he was fourteen and so the only thing that waited for him amongst people was a poorly-kept room above a shop he rented. Here in the wood, on this track, he had Joe. “Come and make camp.”

Later in the falling dark Ned on his back so he wouldn’t have to look at Joe. His mood had ebbed and now he seemed quietly grateful for Ned’s company. Ned read for a while, sensing Joe would not ask though he wanted to hear. After a while he shut the book and instead watched the sky. Joe crawled closer and hummed under his breath. 

“Tell me about your family.”

“I don’t have any.”

“Everybody’s got family,” said Joe. 

“Not me.” He chewed his lip. “You’ve met Jim.”

“He’s your brother?”

“No. He’s known me longest, though.”

“You won’t tell me?”

“You’ve met me.” As though as he were asking for satisfaction; as though he was turning onto his belly and looking Joe in the eyes to ask if he was enough.

Joe, easy in his character and often known to start rather than finish fights, did not take this bait. “Your parents. I want to know about your home.”

“There isn’t anything to know.” He felt Joe move closer and put a hand under Ned’s head to lift him. Ned leaned forward a little, skin across his cheeks and neck prickling with heat as though he had been struck. Joe set his head down in his lap and ran a hand through his chopped hair that was growing long and matted at the back. Where his fingers found knots, he would move around them, gently pulling them through to untangle them. Something caught in Ned’s throat each time he did it, fingers grazing his scalp. “My father died young,” he said at last, unspooling himself from a similar knot in his stomach that was concurrently coming apart under Joe’s touch. “Killed by a sergeant, though we never knew how.” Joe’s hands continued as though there had been no sudden change in the air, though it was colder, felt colder, as they sat together by the fire. “My mother lives in the same shack I was born in with my sister and my brother.”

“Not you?” His voice was soft.

“I was arrested. Parts of me - came away—” He struggled to find himself in the story. He had been rearranging the narrative of this episode to justify his choice for so long that it almost felt like prayer. “And I never got them back.” He felt Joe’s hand on the back of his neck like a roof on a house. Keeping the rain out; keeping the wind out. “I met Jim when we were released. Followed him West.”

He thought for a moment, looking down the line of his body at his own grazed boots. It had been a long time since he had let himself rest, and longer, though it felt like the first time, since he had been touched like this. “I woke up one day and years had passed.” He swallowed. “I couldn’t go home. Not even to see her.”

“Will you ever?” Joe pushed his fingers up against his scalp and left them there. Something low in Ned’s belly twisted and gave way. 

“No need to. Family doesn’t need me.” He hesitated, trying to find a way to speak without sounding cruel. “We’d only make each other worse.”

Joe hummed. “That’s a shame.”

“Maybe.” He looked up at Joe. “What does it matter to you?”

“Seems I’m your only family. Aren’t you lonely?”

Ned shrugged. He could feel Joe’s legs at his back and the creeping warmth from the fire. 

Joe was looking at him. Ned reached up, unsure of what devil possessed him, knowing only that he had never felt a want as strong as this, and good and solid as this, and pushed his fingers to Joe’s lips. He traced the shape of his mouth, the way it parted for him, the ridge of Joe’s straight teeth, sharp like a predator’s, the soft curve of his tongue. Joe’s stare seemed wide and dark, deeper than anger. 

When Ned dropped his hand, they considered each other in the dark of the night. He had been wrong, standing on this path, assessing himself amongst this land. It was not silent; some far off creature opened its mouth and called like a bird, a song for its companions, only sharper and richer. The sound was broken up by the trees, bouncing off the trunks and the spaces between them, which themselves creaked softly in the wind. At last Ned understood that the rage in his belly has subsided, for he no longer felt sick and spiteful; only longing and distant from any other world but this one, this patch of green and growth. Joe leaned down and kissed him and held his face between his two hands with the gentleness he reserved for all living things. It was unlike kissing a woman, Ned thought; unlike anyone or anything. 

He drew back and watched him for a moment. Ned felt his chest rise and fall, almost embarrassed by the rough edge of his breathing, and nodded, absent from his own body, feeling light without the anger. Joe drew his leg out from under Ned, which made him fall back against the dust and laugh, and then lay over him. He put his hands up under his jacket, his shirt, holding him, putting nails into flesh. As they fucked Joe spoke into his ear very sweetly and Ned looked away. It felt good because it felt right, as Joe moved inside him, hand in his hand. Joe was making him anew. In the fire he saw himself and he was no longer Ned Kelly; the name had been burned off of him, like dirt from skin.

(III)

He had always had a certain weakness, and he knew this with certainty: he wanted to be good and he wanted to be loved. No one else made mistakes as he did because they felt this way. It was what had made him pull the boy from the lake and sit opposite him in the bath admiring his eyes as a child. At the time his mother had reassured him. It was natural to admire what you didn’t have, and the boy was made and moulded by wealth. Even then, he remembered, the flick of her tongue to the roof of her mouth before she spoke, tone delicate, a sure sign of doubt. She seemed to know of the weakness he had inside him, some sickness of the heart. Nothing comes free in this world, she had said, incensed after he had come home, so you have to be strong. Harry Power had perhaps known too, with a careful hand on the shoulder, and the emphasised power of truth in telling his own story. The necessity of being strong. He had similarly grasped Ned by the neck on the snowed-in banks of the high trail and told him this was the way the world was - that this was how a man must act.

Subsequently, after he had been released from his cell, he felt the need to get away from home like a flame under his feet, half-afraid that he would be bad all his life. The terror came at night in those early days of sleeping by the road and hitching lifts with Jim, though Jim himself never said a word, only pulling the blankets around them both when Ned’s convulsions became strong in the cold. There was a deep fear that all along his mother had been right and it was weakness that set him on this path. But it melted in the day, under the sun, and soon enough they had gone so far West, Jim felt he could settle. In a town that Jim had picked they found lodgings, at first together and then as Jim began to find women to keep company with, separately. They took similar jobs, made similar money, competed in various fights and began to feel as though this might be living. Then he had met Joe, and Jim had married a teacher’s daughter, who sometimes made dinner for the three of them if he stopped by early enough. Though the jobs were transient and money scarce, it felt as though he had put down roots that might begin to grow. If he tended to them, he had supposed they might one day be strong, or sturdy enough to dispel the fear. He and Joe had taken to thinking of one another as lovers. He had sworn to never take a wife, which Joe agreed to, though it made him laugh, They travelled together regularly so that they could do as they pleased and at night, instead of the man who had died on top of him on the trail, stinking of his own sheltered weakness, he dreamed of buying a house like the one Jim owned, of finding that quiet again, and swore he would never go back.

So like the dress in his father’s buried chest, naturally, things arose to challenge this confidence. After another seasonal livestock job they suddenly acquired more money than they were used to. For the first time in their lives together, it went beyond thinking about what they would have to eat. 

“We should give this to your family,” Joe said as they descended to the lower floors of a hotel. “If we have money enough to live, we should help them.”

“We don’t even know they’re alive.” It was the strongest argument he could muster, given there was no way of explaining the weakness to Joe.

“They are,” said Joe. His eyes were bright in the sallow yellow colouring of the hotel. “A friend mentioned the business they’re having. Your mother’s.”

“If they have good business then they don’t need my money.”

“You’d ignore them for that?”

“No,” he said, sidling to the corner of the room - a wide, large space, something used for dining, he thought - and stripped off his shirt and trousers. Joe did the instinctive assessment of his body he made every time they took off their clothes. He had seen Ned’s body too many times before, and yet seemed to love it still. He softened and put a hand on Ned’s shoulder. 

“I can’t go back,” he said to Joe, before he could speak, ignoring the gathering crowd that filtered down the stairs into the room, or the men with loose ties arranging sheets on the floor and buckets of water to hold each corner down. “You know why. Something’s gone, and going there won’t bring it back.” His hand lingered on top of Joe’s as he tried to move it from his shoulder. “I think it might make it worse.”

Joe nodded. He seemed shallowly disappointed, but concealed it easily, smiling at him as he squared up. 

As Ned beat the other man he looked up briefly; saw the intense stare of a weasel-faced stranger in the crowd, the baying public, and then Joe himself, who earlier had cheered and now seemed uneasy, even as he held up his arms to chant. Ned looked at his opponent. His nose was bent out of shape and his two front teeth curving inward at an angle. His skin was slick with blood, so thick now that it looked unlike blood, instead some kind of dye, some kind of oil. The weakness was still there, he thought, in a way he couldn’t remove or shape or set like a bone. It had to be satiated, and for a time would stay quiet. But it was there, sure as the love Joe had given him. It was there.

He felt bold, after the fight. He liked to think of his body as a tool, as something detached from his mind and soul, one that he could operate without feeling hurt. It had achieved. He was doing what he was made for, with purpose. On the basis of this confidence he shuffled Joe into his room for a drink without the landlord’s wife noticing. He stayed most of the night and by first light had made his way to Ned’s bed. With Joe’s hands on his body he suddenly froze. Joe stopped and watched him. 

“Are you okay?”

He nodded. “I think - if you still want to - we can go.”

Joe scrambled to comfort him. “We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. I don’t care!” He put a hand to Ned’s face, moved his thumb over Ned’s nose. “I don’t care about anything except you.”

Ned smiled, looking down at the sheets. They had encountered almost every situation together and it was this that made him shy - the brazen, untempered affection, the love, freely given, the wide-eyed honesty of how Joe spoke to him. He looked up. “I want to stay with you,” he said. “So let’s go. Nothing will change.”

Joe kissed his mouth, his chin, his jaw; then his down his neck to his shoulder. “Nothing could.”

They walked, unable to borrow a horse from Jim, who instead bid them goodbye from the door to his house with a watchful look at Ned. There were many things he wanted to say, almost felt himself reach for Jim and ask to be let in. Instead he grinned and waved, and then pulled Joe’s hat low over his ears to make him laugh. 

The walk took the best part of a day. They climbed onto the back of the cargo train under the cover of night and then slept in turns on the open-topped car. In the morning he ignored Joe a little so that he would poke and provoke him more. When Ned climbed over him, reaching for the book, he pressed himself against him, kissing him slow and long. It felt like perhaps it would be the last time, for in front of his family things would have to change. He was still trying to engineer a reason to bring him along, as though as any friend might be an insult to his mother. He felt nauseated by the idea that she would look Joe up and down and wonder what good was left in him that Ned should leave his family for. And then, if she was clever, which she always had been, finding her answer without any prompting from Ned himself, even after carefully altering his words and movements around Joe. That she should have his weakness confirmed was the worst suggestion of all. But he put this away inside his head and roughly touched Joe on the train though he knew they might be seen. 

“That’s us,” Joe said, as he read from the book later, when the train was slowing. He sounded more triumphant than he had been before, though that had entailed whooping under Ned and reaching up to kiss his cheek. “I know that’s us.”

She didn’t even have to wonder. As soon as she held him, he supposed that she had known. By the time he introduced Joe, she was smiling and pulling him closer, which seemed to surprise him. 

“I’m glad that you’re well,” she said, and then softer, though it made something in his chest contract, “And I’m glad you’re with my boy, and keeping him well.”

In spite of that, he found it difficult to enjoy home. It went about as well as he thought; his mother would not take the money, though Dan tried, George King - a man not much older than Ned - did his best to charm him, though it felt like a worm borrowing inside his brain. At night he would sleep outside whilst Joe lay close and stroke his hair. 

“I need to leave,” he said. “I need to leave. Something is wrong.”

Joe, thinking of the dreams, would hold him close, and in the morning Ned was too numb to try and explain. 

Then came the night he woke to sound of Dan and Steve bringing the stolen horses into the yard. He had watched them before they rode by the paddock, seen them lean across to cradle the other’s faces. It seemed at once to put back on Ned’s skin the marks that he had tried to hard to wipe clean. There was a crime that would put Dan in a cell and brutalise him as Ned himself had been. But more than this he felt hurt by the freedom. Dan wore as he liked and still Ellen Quinn loved her son; he wore as he liked and still Steve Hart loved him as Joe loved Ned. If all along they had lived out here as they wanted and for years he had been hurting himself in secret trying to change his nature, then the running and hiding was useless. He tried to snatch the dress, pulling Dan from the horse, but Dan hit him across the face with his gloved hand. 

“Dan,” he had tried to say in the morning, in the bath, nursing the bruise, whilst Joe sat beside him on the grass and smoked his pipe. “You can’t do that. You’ll get hurt. I only want you to understand.” 

Dan, who was still damp when Ned had slapped bathwater out the sides of the basin onto his shirt, laughed. He spoke from the corner of his mouth drawn, so his teeth looked sharp and cruel. “You a coward now?”

“No.” He sunk deeper in the water. Perhaps in some way hoping Dan would have trailed back to the house and ignored him, he said at last, “Dan, the way they hurt me. . . I’ve been running from it since.”

“I won’t get caught, Ned.” 

“It’s just not the stealing.” Dan met his gaze, watched him carefully as he came back to the side of the bath. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I saw you. The dress.”

Dan shrugged. “It feels good. Why should you wear that jacket?”

“Because I like it—”

Dan spoke quickly, putting a hand at the end of the bath. “And I like the dress. No one but you saw. And no one out here would care.”

“I saw you - with Steve,” he said, carefully, feeling Joe suddenly sit up in comprehension at his side. 

Dan looked panicked, if only for a moment. Ned watched the sharpness of his stare soften, as though a shutter had closed over his eyes. “And?”

“It’s dangerous. You could get caught.”

He stepped closer, crossing his arms. “Does it stop you?” Something in Ned’s belly sunk. He shrunk away from Dan, which made Dan falter. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—“

“It’s fine—”

“I know you’ve been hurt.” Dan swallowed. “I’m sorry. But everything out here is always wrong, no matter what you do. That’s why they brought Dad here. For being poor, for being like us, for dressing like him, for having anything to say, for looking wrong, for being on the land first.” He splashed Ned with the bathwater and then retreated. Though his laugh was playful when he spoke, Ned felt that he was being scolded. “I’m not going to change because they want to punish me. They’ll do that no matter what.”

After he dried off and changed while Joe watched him. As his hair was drying straggled at the back, Joe reached to comb his fingers through it. 

“He’s brave, your brother.” Joe inched closer. “He’s wrong, but he’s brave.”

Ned nodded. “So was I.” The hand went still against his neck. “So was I.”

In all that followed he wondered desperately why at that moment he had not taken Joe’s hand and left. He should have stayed ignorant, in the town, with Jim. He should have stayed away. Caring for people only meant taking risks he could no longer justify. 

Still he stayed, in spite of himself, and returned the dresses. Under the gaze of the Fitzpatrick he felt himself shrink. This, in turn, as the very last thing he had shed, reignited the fire in his belly. It only grew as he tried to prove himself; he talked with him, kept away from his family for a time, and slept in the same bed as Mary Hearn, though he could not love her, and told her as much.

“I promised I wouldn’t take lovers.”

She smiled. “You’re one of those.”

He raised an eyebrow. 

“The faithful.” She laughed, and turned over, still wearing the dress. “You’d be surprised how many of them make their way here.”

He was quiet. She tried to kiss him and he lay like a stone in the bedclothes. She pulled away. 

“Okay,” she said. “I believe you. I’m sorry.” She got up and went between two sheets hung up like a partition to tend to something. When she came back, she sat down next to him and put the baby between them. 

“This is George.” They lay there for a while, watching him make noises and reach for his mother. The baby curled its fist around his little finger. 

“If you tell Fitzpatrick that I love you,” he said, measuring his words, “that we lay together, but no one else, then I promise to protect you.”

“How would you do that, Ned Kelly?”

“I’ll act as his father.”

“Would your wife like that?”

“No wife,” he said. 

“Would your lady like that?” 

“No,” he had said, and meant to stop, but it was as though Dan were beside him, in all his defiance, reminding him not to change. “He’ll never marry either.”

She stared at him. When he could not meet her eyes, he looked at the baby, the way it held him. 

“I’ll say whatever you want.” She took his hand, over the baby, in her own. She turned whilst he dressed, later, and waved to him through the door as he descended the stairs. 

He smoked beside Fitzpatrick and sat close, though his skin was crawling. Already he felt the anger changing. At the dance, when he tried to get to Ned’s sister, it ran hot through his veins. Afterwards he had slept outside the house again. 

“Joe,” he said. “It’s too late to leave,” though Joe slept next to him, and only stirred to turn over onto his side.

In the kitchen, with Joe at his side and his sister in her lovely white dress, he knew it was done. He could not shoot Fitzpatrick - there was the weakness, everyone could see it as his mother screamed at him - and the anger was unsettled inside, unravelling. As he rode away from the house he found it was becoming untenable, but could not stop it. Even as Joe cried with shaking hands at Stringybark Creek and failed to light his pipe, Ned felt he could not stop it. When they were making camp for the night, Ned sat and began writing in his book. He was covered in another man’s blood, a dress that belonged to a dead woman, and he felt at last that he must give in.

(IV) 

In the tent, under their many blankets, Joe allowed him to come close again. It felt good, to be welcomed back, to be forgiven. Joe had treated him with an uncharacteristic coolness the year or so that they had been on the run since Fitzpatrick’s murder. At the beginning Ned had seen it as a necessary loss, without which he would not be able to protect the four of them, or be strong enough to protect Mary, and Kate, and his mother. As time wore on and Joe shied away from his hands and his touch, put distance between them, laughed when he tried to speak his mind and became solemn when Ned tried to joke, it felt like the loss of a limb. Sometimes he still felt its phantom itch and spasm when he met Joe’s eyes across the fire; but it would dissipate, and he would be left feeling oddly hollow. 

He sat beside him and smoked, then offered the pipe to Joe. When the air around them felt slow and thick like treacle Joe leaned over and put his head on Ned’s shoulder. They lay together under thick blankets whilst the air outside blew sharp and cold around the tent. Ned put his arm around Joe’s waist and left it there. When Joe didn’t turn away he let himself smile. This skin in his face was stinging, from the cold and from his pulse underneath which was almost sore in the way it jumped. Joe kissed him, pulling him closer, wishing in his slow and melting voice that things had not taken place between them, that they had never been friends, that they would have ended up anywhere but in this tent.

“Then I would not have known you,” Ned said, legs either side of Joe’s waist, guardedly watching his face.

Joe shrugged. “Would that have been so bad?”

He drew his hands away from his Joe’s face and held his own neck, tightly, feeling his grip tighten around his own throat. “Yes,” he said, though the noise was strangled. 

“You’d have been fine without me.” Joe’s hair was spread behind him like some kind of pretty stain. Ink from a jar. 

He shook his head, the movement made clumsy by his addled brain.

“What—” said Joe, trying to find his voice whilst looking at Ned, “You’d do this all again? Knowing we’d end up here.”

Ned looked down at him. I’m the most dangerous man in all of New South Wales, he felt tempted to say, for Joe’s opinions of power were very low indeed and he had never had the ambition that the Kelly boys were born with. If he could understand how it felt to be listened to and followed. The unimaginable confidence of someone whose story would be told long after their expiration. But he knew already that Joe was familiar with this feeling. Since the day they had met Ned had not left him alone.

“Yes,” said Ned, though it was barely noise at all through the crushing of his own windpipe. Joe fought to pull Ned’s hands from his throat, and though Ned pushed him away, eventually the dizziness and the creeping black over his eyes made him weak and he let go. 

On their walk to the tracks, Joe was suddenly seized with fury. He didn’t act in anger, though Ned saw it in his eyes as he pulled him aside. The snow was soaking through Ned’s worn shoes as they stood still, Dan and Steve meandering ahead down the track.

“What is it?” He said, his words clipped. 

“Ned.” Joe put a hand under his chin and kissed him.

Ned made a noise and moved to hold him, but Joe pushed him gently away. When he drew back, much like that first time, something ragged was tearing its way through his chest.

“Listen to me, Ned. I’m angry that I’ll die, but—”

“What are you talking about?”

“—I’m angry that I should die, but I grieve for you, Ned.” He put a hand either side of Ned’s face. His touch was gentle, as a parent might handle a baby; as Mary had held George. “Maybe it’s my fault, I didn’t listen when I led you here.”

“Joe,” he said, “It’s okay. You won’t die. We’ll get my mother and go West.”

“There’s no running from this.”

“Further West, then. We’ll follow King - go to America.”

“I meant the anger.” Joe’s face was covered in slick oil and dirt. Ned imagined he looked the same. The marks of growing up a prisoner’s son on stolen land with no money made real. “You can’t run from your anger, Edward Kelly.”

“Are you trying—” To save my soul, he would have said, incredulous, and kissed him, if Joe had let him; a distant shot rang through the trees and Dan, now a hundred yards down the snowy path, turned and called out to him. He took off running, a hand in Joe’s own, and did not let go until they were in the fires of the lodge. 

Joe, too weak to speak, pressed his fingers against Ned’s chin; he opened his mouth and nothing but air came out. His eyes were drooping in their sockets, his whole face in a palsy that had set in with the pain. His weak stare seemed burdened only by the knowledge that he had been right. They had found hell together. Here in the cell with the fires lapping across the floor and Dan’s blood coating his skin, it was easy to believe the anger had opened up the way down.

“I’m sorry.” He put an arm around Joe’s shoulders to cradle him.

Joe opened his mouth again and with it the blood from his nostrils fell onto lips and tongue. 

“It’s okay,” Ned said, “It’s okay.” He was crying, eyes wet and burned by the heat and metal. 

Joe breathed in, the sound of the wind through the trees rattling inside his chest, and raised a hand to Ned’s face, limply brushing it against his cheek. “Go,” he said.

(V)

On the gangway whilst the priest read to him about forgiveness, he felt absolved by Joe’s sentiments having been more affective and generous than those of a man who had studied all his life to provide comfort to people. He was crying again, though he was ashamed to do so in front of those standing to the side of him, watching his body be positioned over the dropping panel. 

The platform before him was weighed by so many ghosts he thought it would collapse. Some were not even dead, but given his proximity to his own end, appeared before him anyway; his mother and Kate, Mary and George, himself as a boy, reaching out, with that pinched expression he had often worn to hide his fear. Dan and Steve seemed half a yard away, so close he could touch them; yet Dan’s hair was drawn back into the dark, shifting, not quite realised. He searched for him amongst their pale faces, though he knew he shouldn’t, for he had led each of them to this moment in one way or another. 

He glanced down, though his mother had told him not to. He could not help it. It was the weakness he still carried, and didn’t resent so much anymore. 

Joe looked up at him from under his hat and through the black metal spokes of the grating. He said nothing, but his eyes crinkled with the same humour they had possessed some four or five years ago on the night they met. He smiled. Even as they put the bag over his head he could feel his gaze on him. 

But you will, Joe had said. Ned heard it clearly now, like music, as though he were in the room. He heard it still as he dropped, and Joe rushed up to meet him.

(VI)

“Show me how to walk like an angry man, Ned Kelly,” Joe said. They had left the bar as the fight had broken out and quickly lost Jim. Joe was hesitant, he told Ned, about most conflict - he was not the fighting type. Ned, though he was and knew it vividly, found himself desperate to convey the opposite. Anything to make Joe stay.

“It’s not that hard,” said Ned, laughing. Joe tried to mimic his stride as he walked behind him and tripped a little. He caught himself on Ned, putting a hand on his shoulder. A feeling passed through Ned as he did so, and caught Joe’s teasing stare. Like a spreading burn under the skin.

“Like this,” he said, showing him again, scuffing his boots. “With heavy feet.” When he was finished, though people were beginning to watch their drunken game on the street corner, he offered his hand to Joe, who took it.

For a moment Joe held on. He savoured it: the absence of touch was like ice in the palm. Joe squeezed his wrist and let go.

**Author's Note:**

> please excuse a glaring lack of editing and subpar historical detail. i did some research and used a lot of carey's original novel but obviously that can't account for everything. i really rec the book if you enjoyed the movie.
> 
> fun fact: jim kelly was ned's younger brother and according to his biography is responsible for introducing him and joe. though i chose to leave him out to try and stick to the movie's storyline, i did want to include him, so he appears as sort of an OC. 
> 
> stay safe and well! i'm on tumblr here [(x)](https://om-johnirv.tumblr.com)


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